The Economy Rumbles Back to Life: Advertisers Are Freeing Up Dollars for Trusted Marketing Buys

IT Business Edge Sees Record CPL Revenue with Three Consecutive Months of Growth.

LOUISVILLE, KY – June 9, 2009 – In another sign that businesses are freeing up advertising dollars to regain sales momentum, IT Business Edge has announced that they have set new records for Cost Per Lead (CPL) revenue in the three consecutive months of March, April and May of this year. IT Business Edge is a free professional community site providing over 650,000 business decision makers with up-to-the-minute analysis, collaborative tools, white papers and relevant templates that allows executives and IT professionals to easily gather information, make smart investments, and run their companies more efficiently.

"March, April and May have ended up being three of our top five months in the company history for CPL revenue, and we attribute this strong resurgence to tech advertisers coming back to the marketplace, even if somewhat cautiously," said Phil Branon, president, IT Business Edge. "Based on our conversations, advertisers came back to IT Business Edge because they knew from experience that we represented an excellent investment of their marketing dollars. We have proven ourselves as a vehicle to reach engaged decision makers who control large IT budgets and to convert those users into potential sales opportunities for our IT vendor partners."

Like many online publishing sites, IT Business Edge saw CPL revenue pull back in January and February as technology companies experienced a lack of visibility into their sales pipelines; the economy was in free fall and the banking system appeared headed for nationalization. It was during this time that IT Business Edge took advantage of the lull and aggressively moved forward to launch a new version of their site that added peer-to-peer collaboration and additional B2B tools to encourage strong user engagement.

"We saw an opportunity at the end of 2008 and the first months of this year to build IT Business Edge into a fully collaborative environment and take advantage of the slowdown by reaching out to new users," continued Branon. "CPL revenue came storming back in March, with more than a 50 percent increase over February, and we feel our investment was a smart, strategic decision at a key time to better serve our readers and advertisers."

As part of its service, IT Business Edge features expert analysis in blogs that cover a wide range of business issues and technology trends affecting large enterprises and SMBs, allowing users to cut through information clutter, identify strategies and assess relevance to their business needs. In addition, B2B-focused tools let users access and contribute to high-value business documents, track their community participation, and enjoy access to business IT-focused wikis, whitepaper libraries and a community of executives, directors and managers responsible for making IT decisions in their organizations. Vertical IT experts from the IT Business Edge editorial staff, along with analysts and consultants who have joined the IT Business Edge community, provide additional resources for site users, including downloadable templates, calculators and business process documents. IT Business Edge community editors expand and enhance these tools based on feedback from community members, creating an evolving environment where the community shapes the coverage and resources provided as much as the editors.

"We believe that business decision makers need perspective — from experts, from their peers, and from leading vendors — to make choices that will allow them to stay in front of the curve, and IT Business Edge provides the platform to deliver all those points of view," continued Branon. "Our goal is to provide value to all of our stakeholders — IT decision makers and IT vendors."

About IT Business Edge

Published by Louisville-based NarrowCast Group, LLC., IT Business Edge delivers an intelligent approach to information that is focused, personalized, thorough, practical, concise and current, providing IT decision makers with an easier and more effective way to stay on top of the IT issues affecting their companies. The site allows technology professionals to gain up-to-the-minute analysis of the technology landscape and evolving strategies, solve problems with their peers and industry experts, work efficiently and choose cost-effective approaches for their business IT needs.

Combining a moderated professional community of business IT decision makers—featuring peer-to-peer interaction, document exchange and personalized information tracking areas—with expert opinion and research culled from more than 3,000 technology publishers, vendors, analysts and association, IT Business Edge provides a business IT destination where users can find to find relevant information, real-world techniques and solutions that can help decision makers efficiently stay on the leading edge of business IT.